Making an Issue out of a Standard

Abstract

The article focuses on stories and storytelling practices as explanatory resources in standardization processes. It draws upon an ethnographic study of the development of a technical standard for data sharing in an ecological research community, where participants struggle to articulate the difficulties encountered in implementing the standard. Building from C. Wright Mills' classic distinction between private troubles and public issues, the authors follow the development of a story as it comes to assist in transforming individual troubles in standard implementation into an institutional issue for the 1 ecological scientific community. The authors present the ''hands-on'' social science collaboration in this study as an example of a mechanism for supporting institutionalization of issues. Finally, the authors argue that narratives can serve as effective organizing principles within institutional settings, thereby providing an approach to understand the practical, substantive difficulties that occur in work with data in the sciences. Keywords stories, sensemaking, standards, intervention, trouble, issueNasreddin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side: ''Hey! how do I get across?'' ''You are across!'' Nasreddin shouted back.Between 1997 and 2001, a team of information technologists at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) initiated and carried through the first stages of development for the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). The introduction of the standard would serve as a groundbreaking event in ecology, promising to facilitate the interdisciplinary sharing of data sets and new avenues for large-scale collaborations in ecological research. As a ''universal'' language by which standardized descriptions of ecological data could be produced, data would circulate and be shared across disciplinary fields and laboratories. In 2001, the standard was officially adopted by one of the largest research communities in ecology. This adoption marked the high point in a ''success story'' of datastandard development in the sciences.However, individual research sites within the Network had difficulty using the standard when tagging actual ecological data. In particular, information managers, who were tasked with the responsibility of the majority of the work in implementation began to report troubles. It was found that contrary to an idealized image of a ''universal'' language, individual research sites have their own ways of naming, classifying, and organizing their data, making use of specific terminologies and measurement units that were not accommodated by the new standard.Over time, a new story of the standard and the standardization process has begun to emerge within the Network. In this story, the standard is not yet a success, substantial work in implementation remains, and doing this work requires changes to the standard itself, along with renewed access to human resources and time. We ask: What happened in this process of implementation of a standar...

Standards and Their (Recurring) Stories: How Augmented Reality Markup Language Was Built on Stories of Past Standards

“…Stories are an important narrative tool that can contain, shape, and circulate each of these discourses, which is why they are an important object of analysis surrounding standards. Through the lens of stories, how they are told and how they gain meaning, scholars documented instances where stories are powerful forces for individual and organizational legitimacy (Lampland and Star 2009; Law and Singleton 2000; Millerand et al 2013). Standards are inextricably linked to stories, either as the subject of them and/or as the product of them.…”

“…Existing work has focused on the role of stories in terms of local resistance and power struggles (Busch 2011; Lampland and Star 2009), how stories affect standards implementation (Millerand et al 2013), and the consequences of the standard (David 1985; Pargman and Palme 2009). Within this tradition, it is an ongoing project to empirically document and map specific ways that stories are actively deployed by people creating standards as a sensemaking activity, a tactical/persuasive device, and an organizing principle.…”

“…Through an ethnographic study of the deliberation, creation, and formalization of ARML, this study maps the various phases, decisions, and stories being advanced around the creation of an emerging technology standard. This study builds on sociological studies that reported on the importance of stories in the standards process (Bowker and Star 2000; Lampland and Star 2009) and the ways that stories get reframed around standards (Millerand et al 2013). With ARML, the key story that kept being advanced and debated was an analogous story involving the original Internet markup language, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).…”

Research data and metadata curation as institutional issues

“…For example, administrators for one LTER site spent over 3 months finding and contacting scientists to collect and correct metadata for old data sets (San Gil et al, 2009). The LTER network as a whole devised strategies to make these challenges visible at the institutional level (Millerand, Ribes, Baker, & Bowker, 2013), including defining organizational roles, divisions of labor, creating documentation, and establishing guidelines and rules. Over 6,000 EML metadata records, the bulk of the data records held by LTER sites, now exist within the LTER network's central data archive (San Gil et al, 2009).…”

“…The process of adjusting (or coercing) routines to incorporate EML within individual LTER sites took many years after the official "adoption" of EML by the LTER network, and required dedicated effort by the site information managers (Millerand & Bowker, 2009). Ultimately, EML implementation required elevating the standard to a symbolic level within the entire network (Millerand et al, 2013).…”